Color is a funny thing. A phenomenon our brains cobble together from the data streaming in from our eyes, it fills us with a whole spectrum of sensations. We chop it up into categories, giving each a name. Then, our knowing the names actually affects how we see and think about the sensations. Here are three books all about color: one is about the names, one about the phenomenon, and one just lets those sensations do their work on us, in a gratifying way.

“Red Sings From Treetops: A Year in Colors” is an illustrated poem chronicling the seasonal doings of Red, Yellow and so on, in atmospheric vignettes with a conceptual twist, and with exquisite results. The Red in the title is a cardinal, singing in springtime: “cheer-cheer-cheer, / each note dropping/ like a cherry / into my ear.” In summer, “White clinks in drinks.” “Yellow melts/ everything it touches . . . / smells like butter, tastes like salt.”

Joyce Sidman’s language is vivid and deft. Slyly, she’s conflating color as a sensation with color as a name: the words White and Yellow are stand-ins for ice and popcorn, the things they color. The rhetorical device is metonymy — calling an object by a related object or quality. It’s wonderfully strange to read of colors with sounds, smells and tastes. But when “Red turns/ the maples feathery, / sprouts in rhubarb spears,” something stranger still is happening: Red is an essence, a primordial force that enters things, becomes and defines them. In winter, “Green darkens, shrinks,/ stiffens into needles,” a bracing image for winter’s cold contractions. The language draws mystery and magic around the most familiar scenes.

There is no way for pictures to address this linguistic effect. The illustrator is obligated to paint a cardinal and ice, popcorn and pine trees. It may be the impossibility of illustrating the central magic of the poem that led Pamela Zagarenski to pile on all kinds of other mystery, or at least mystifying details, in her delicately painted scenes. Cardinals sing in the trees, but with crowns hovering over their heads. Images of birdcages and windows hang from the sky.

To create a sense of story not present in the text, Zagarenski introduces a human figure or two; they are tiny-headed creatures in huge conical dresses, also wearing crowns and sometimes wheels under their feet. The paintings, while quite beautiful, feel obscure. A primitive quality in their style might encourage parents to give the book to children too young to respond to the poetry, but second graders and up, at least those who like language, should love it.

Photo

Henny Penny in “Yummy.”

Where “Red Sings From Treetops” plays with colors as words, Antoinette Portis’s graphically bold “Penguin Story” is the polar opposite: a desire for new color experiences drives the plot. Edna the penguin, who knows only the white of snow, the blue of the sea and the black sky at night, is sure there must be “something else,” and it’s up to her to find it.

The story, a quest to bring color into a lacking world, isn’t new to children’s literature, but that’s all right; children who take to this book won’t know the precedents.

Edna’s problem and its solution are a bit short on dramatic tension — her quest is fulfilled quickly and at little cost, as she stumbles on what appears to be a brilliant, orange rising sun. But the visual rewards are striking. On the next page that sun turns out to be an orange tent, part of a human expedition that includes a great deal of orange. It’s no small pleasure in the written story that Edna’s “something else” goes unnamed — the word “orange” never comes up. The drama is in the withholding, and little readers who know the word will want to shout it out.

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The same sort of withholding — of that new color, of what that sun really is — brings even more pleasure to the artwork. It’s bold, simple, cleanly designed. Portis’s penguins are pretty adorable, and when the whole rookery clusters knee-high around the expedition, helping them pack for home, it’s a blissful scene of inter­species friendship.

Color is at least as much a player in “Yummy” as in the other two books — Lucy Cousins’s collection of eight popular fairy tales simply delivers a lot of it. The traditional stories economically retold here (including “Henny Penny,” “The Enormous Turnip” and “Little Red Riding Hood”) usually feature pictures rich in detail: they work to give a flavor of the historical and cultural worlds that produced the tales. But Cousins’s artistic style, closely resembling tempera painting scrawled by a child, is almost devoid of detail. Why does it feel so satisfying? Because the world of this book is, delightfully, a world made of paint. It’s not history, not culture, but the feeling of the big, flat colored page that pulls you into the story.

A jaunty humor shows itself in the blobby brushwork, but also in the expressions on the faces of wolves, hens or little girls (all wearing cheerful clothing of indeterminate period). Even the words get a chance to express themselves as paint: most spreads include something — a title, a quotation from the story or a bit of commentary — written across the page in thick black brushstrokes, like a child chiming in while a parent reads. It’s a good take on these traditional tales for very young book-lovers. This is a book that will make you want to paint.

Even if you don’t immediately reach for the paintbrushes, “Yummy” offers a brilliant color experience and an introduction to fairy tales that everyone should know. You might be compelled to draw after reading “A Penguin Story,” because those cute penguins are so simple practically anyone could make one. But read “Red Sings From Treetops,” and I think you’ll be more inclined to sing.

RED SINGS FROM TREETOPS

A Year in Colors

By Joyce Sidman

Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski

Unpaged. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. $16. (Ages 5 to 8)

A PENGUIN STORY

Written and illustrated by Antoinette Portis

Unpaged. HarperCollins Publishers. $17.99. (Ages 4 to 8)

YUMMY

Eight Favorite Fairy Tales

Written and illustrated by Lucy Cousins

121 pp. Candlewick Press. $18.99. (Ages 3 and up)

Paul O. Zelinsky has illustrated many books for children and won the 1998 Caldecott Medal for his “Rapunzel.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 8, 2009, on Page BR20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Color Schemes. Today's Paper|Subscribe